Cancer Death

CANCER

Sagan says there a dragon
Inside each of us. You
Coil against the sofa.
Your well-formed head
Lolls on the headrest.
Your eyes close (oh, yes)
Thick lizard lids.
The heat of unruly mitosis
Has inundated, sun-baked, your senses.
You must rest.  You
Hold onto that old charlatan Dr. Good
And his cure-all, be-all, end-all;
But his quaint formula
Claws at my chest.  You
Got all broken
Eggs and empty nests.  You
Keep fighting, lying
There in serpentine radiation stripes,
With a thin snaky rope
Of saliva worming its
Determined way out of the corner
Of your mouth and down
Your saurian chin.
The reptile inside spreads
Its venom, striking
And striking.
Would you like my gun?
Blow its head off?
Rip those fangs out?
Oh, you sweet
Devil, you mesmerize
Me with your death.

1979


Peggy and I had dated earlier but had settled into a friendship when she found out she had cancer.  I stuck with her, taking her places and doing things with her, although I wouldn't be intimate with her.  I watched her hair fall out and her robust figure reduced to stick limbs.  The oncologist let her smoke marijuana on the hosptial balcony nearest her room.  I went to see her the night she died.  I stood next to her bed and held her hand.  She was very weak but smiled at me and thanked me for staying with her.  I kissed her.  Once she had fallen asleep, I left.  I was the last person to see her alive.  I wrote another poem for her and read it at her funeral and gave it to her parents.  Her abusive father cried more than anyone else, sobbing and wailing as if to make up for his drunken abuse and stupors.  I sat in the first row, close to the open coffin.  Once as I stared at her filled-in, made-over face, she seemed to smile and wink at me, which freaked me out.

This poem was first published in Monsters in a Half-Way House , 1981, although earlier I had read it publicly at the Greenwich Village Cafe.  If you have read the last three posts, you have probably begun to understand why I titled this collection of poems Monsters.

By the way, the allusion to Carl Sagan, the scientist, is based on his book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.  He also fought cancer before his death and used marijuana.